"Mji wake ni mzuri."
Translation:His town is nice.
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AFAIK it should be accepted, keep in mind that the course is still in beta, if your correction is accepted, they send you an e-mail telling you that it was added.
Despite being linguistically unrelated, mji and the Japanese machi (町) (both meaning the same) sound more or less alike, which is a good mnemonic for those who know the Japanese word.
no. the "wa-" in "wake" in this case comes from the singular prefix "m-" in the M/MI non class (from "mji"), not the plural "wa-" prefix of the M/WA noun class.
the "-ke" is the singular part of "wake" showing that it belongs to one entity "him."
- his town = mji wake
- their town = mji wao
- my town = mji wangu
- our town = mji wetu
1088
I tried "village" instead of "town" and was marked incorrect. I feel like town and village are synonyms, but not so in Swahili?
Yeah. There’s definitely more of a distinction in TZ at least than in the USA. As a rough guide, villages are often hundreds or thousands of people, towns are tens of thousands, and cities are hundreds of thousands and up.
Villages are smaller than towns. These can't be taken as exact equivalents, but more or less:
jiji (plural majiji) = city
mji (plural miji) = town
kijiji (plural vijiji) = village
Mji is the "normal" word with jiji being an augmentative and kijiji being a diminutive of it.
as i understand it mji is just town. But i know it's never totally clear when a population is a large town vs a small city so i have heard people use the word mji to talk about what would likely be considered a city.. there's some gray area. In the states we almost never call anything a "village." Even when only a couple thousand people live somewhere, it's a town...
Why don't you say "...ni nzuri," because a town is a thing, and the sentence is talking about the town, right? And mzuri is when you talk about people and nzuri is when you talk about things, right?
- 1088
It has to do with the noun classes. "Mzuri" is indeed used for people since they are in the first and second class (m/wa) and nouns in that class use the m- prefix for adjectives, but the m- prefix is also used with third class nouns (the singular part of the m/mi pair). A "nice town" would be "mji mzuri" (third class) and "nice towns" would translate as "miji mizuri" (fourth class).